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Steve -- Bill Nelson is not necessarily in a safe seat... Florida is still a swing state. I think the possibility of a "trigger" (the Olympia Snowe idea) is still possible... but it's the only way public option survives... a strong trigger.
Several months ago, President Obama made a promise: People with health insurance would be able to keep exactly what they have.Brooks recommends this story in the Atlantic, and it is indeed a good read:
We all understand why he made that promise. He wanted to reassure people who are happy with what they’ve got. He wanted to mollify the industries that have a vested interest in the status quo.
But Obama’s promise sent the reform effort off the rails. It meant that efforts to expand coverage marched ahead, but efforts to fundamentally reform the system got watered down.
Instead of true reform we got a series of bills that essentially cement the present system in place. The proposals do not fundamentally challenge the fee-for-service system. They don’t make Americans more accountable for their own health care spending. They don’t reduce costs. They just add more people into the mess we’ve got.
The president made this promise to ease passage. But it ended up hollowing out the substance of the reform. And the political benefits didn’t even materialize. Voters are still spooked by the costs, the centralization and the cuts they are sure will come.
If I had a magic hour with the president, I’d tell him this is his ninth-inning chance. He can stay on the current path. He might be able to pass some incremental bill that extends coverage. But he won’t have tackled the fundamental problems that first drove him to this issue. He won’t have cut health care inflation. He won’t have prevented a voracious system from bankrupting the nation, defunding the schools, pushing down wages and impoverishing the young. NYT
I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.The spending:
Yet spending on health care, by families and by the government, is crowding out spending on almost everything else. As a nation, we now spend almost 18 percent of our GDP on health care. In 1966, Medicare and Medicaid made up 1 percent of total government spending; now that figure is 20 percent, and quickly rising. Already, the federal government spends eight times as much on health care as it does on education, 12 times what it spends on food aid to children and families, 30 times what it spends on law enforcement, 78 times what it spends on land management and conservation, 87 times the spending on water supply, and 830 times the spending on energy conservation. Education, public safety, environment, infrastructure—all other public priorities are being slowly devoured by the health-care beast.More:
I’m a Democrat, and have long been concerned about America’s lack of a health safety net. But based on my own work experience, I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system—largely problems of incentives—our reforms won’t do much good, and may do harm. To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy. Read the whole thing I say! One of the best stories yet on health reform.
President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US as he takes a well-earned summer break after just over six months in the world’s biggest and toughest job. FTWhat is wrong with these people? The stream of hate rhetoric is constant. Republicans seem to only represent the fringe. I'm not seeing any mainstream republican voices coming through. I know there are decent republicans in the mix but I can't hear them.
Given hardening Republican opposition to Congressional health care proposals, Democrats now say they see little chance of the minority’s cooperation in approving any overhaul, and are increasingly focused on drawing support for a final plan from within their own ranks.
Top Democrats said Tuesday that their go-it-alone view was being shaped by what they saw as Republicans’ purposely strident tone against health care legislation during this month’s Congressional recess, as well as remarks by leading Republicans that current proposals were flawed beyond repair.
Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said the heated opposition was evidence that Republicans had made a political calculation to draw a line against any health care changes, the latest in a string of major administration proposals that Republicans have opposed.
“The Republican leadership,” Mr. Emanuel said, “has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day.” NYT
The White House sought to reassure jittery supporters Monday that President Obama is not abandoning the fight for a public health insurance option.This is what happened--the AP wrote a story saying that Kathleen Sebelius, on This Week this past Sunday, signaled that the White House was abandoning the public option. I've watched Obama's people day in and day out and Sebelius didn't say anything different, neither did Gibbs, but an AP writer thought they saw something. The AP story gets picked up everywhere and then the rest of the media feels like it has to follow on. In fact, they have no choice. If a media outlet didn't follow on, it would appear as if they weren't in the know. The media is hyper sensitive because they're always looking to be first to break news.
President Obama "believes the public option is the best way" to reform health care, a White House aide says.
The assurance came amid a media firestorm ignited over the weekend by administration officials seeming to indicate a willingness to drop such an option in order to secure congressional approval of a health care reform bill.
The verbal maneuvering reflected the steep political challenge facing an administration trying to balance the competing priorities of the more conservative Senate and the more liberal House of Representatives.
"The president has always said that what is essential is that health insurance reform must lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans, and it must increase choice and competition in the health insurance market," White House aide Linda Douglass said in a written statement.
"He believes the public option is the best way to achieve those goals." CNN
On W.H. officials’ rhetoric in recent days on the public option: "If it was a signal, it was a dog whistle that we started blowing about three months ago, and it just got picked up," Gibbs said. "It’s crazy. It’s not a signal. It’s what we’ve been saying for months on this. The goal is choice and competition. The preference is the public plan. If there are others that have ideas on how we obtain choice and competition in a normally closed private ins market for people who are looking to buy private insurance … but enter a market that only has one entity in it, we’re certainly happy to look at those plans.” -Obama has not reached out to "liberals or lawmakers" on their concern about the fate of public option. “He’s not made any calls," Gibbs said. PoliticoAmericans may be chickening out, falling prey to wingnut propaganda, according to a new poll, but Linda Douglass insists nothing has changed:
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Watch healthcare roundtable at 2 pm, led by Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, here. Statement by the President on Health Care Reform Bill Released by Senate HELP Committee Today
For decades, Washington has failed to act as health care costs continued to rise, crushing businesses, families and placing an unsustainable burden on governments. Today the Senate HELP committee has produced legislation that lowers costs, protects choice of doctors and plans and assures quality and affordable health care for Americans. The Congressional Budget Office has now issued a more complete review of this bill, concluding that it will cost less and cover more Americans than originally estimated. It also contains provisions that will protect the coverage Americans get at work. When merged with the Senate Finance Committee’s companion pieces, the Senate will be prepared to vote for health reform legislation that does not add to the deficit, reduces health care costs and covers 97% of Americans.
The HELP Committee legislation reflects many of the principles I’ve laid out, such as reforms that will prohibit insurance companies from refusing coverage for people with pre-existing conditions and the concept of insurance exchanges where individuals can find affordable coverage if they lose their jobs, move or get sick. Such a marketplace would allow families and some small businesses the benefit of one-stop-shopping for their health care coverage and enable them to compare price and quality and pick the plan that best suits their needs.
Among the choices that would be available in the exchange would be a public health insurance option. The public option would make health care affordable by increasing competition, providing more choices and keeping the insurance companies honest.
The legislation also improves the quality of patient care, improves safety for patients and strengthens the commitment to preventive health care – preventing people from getting sick in the first place.
I thank chairman Kennedy, Senator Dodd, and all the members of the HELP Committee for their hard work on health reform. Read more about health reform here.